The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  “Afterwards,” said Phyllis firmly, flung open the door and stepped into the yard.

  The bigger dog—an ugly-looking beast—had evidently been alarmed by hearing the bolts drawn. It stood glaring, the head of a chicken hanging from its bloody jaws; a sight to daunt a good many folk.

  “Go on, be off with you!” cried Phyllis. She threw the shovel at the dog and followed it up with a blacking-brush—the first missile that came to hand. The brush hit the dog, which ran a little way and stopped. One paw had become entangled in a clutter of old sellotape and wrapping-paper, and this trailed behind it along the stones. The squalid mess all over the yard roused Phyllis—who was tidy, neat and deft as a swallow in all she did—to a total disregard of possible danger.

  “Will you get out of here?” she cried, rushing upon the dog with broom extended and flailing from side to side. “Go on—out!” She caught up with the fleeing dog, pushed it hard with the broom and then chopped downwards. The head of the broom struck the stones and came off the handle. In the same instant the dog, with potato peelings flying from under its hind feet, got clear of the sellotape, leapt the gate and disappeared.

  Phyllis, victorious, turned back, a little breathless, and stood for a moment leaning on the broom-handle. As she did so her eye fell upon the second dog, which in the heat of action she had forgotten. It was indeed a terrible sight—the wreck of what had once been a pedigree, black-and-white, smooth-haired fox terrier. One paw was held awkwardly off the ground and the left flank was plastered with a mixture of dried mud and blood—whether its own or the other dog’s was uncertain, for it had no discernible wound. The stitched gash in its skull was more than Phyllis could regard steadily. After one glance she turned away, went across the yard and opened the door of the shed.

  “I don’t think this one’s likely to give any trouble, Vera,” she called. “Poor little thing! I think it’s been taken badly—and no wonder, either, with that head.”

  The dog remained where it was, looking from Phyllis to Vera and back again in a frightened, furtive manner. After a few moments it got up, its tail between its legs, and, shaking from head to rump, began to slink across the yard.

  “I think it’s hungry and frightened to death as well,” said Vera, bending down to the dog. “What’s your name, then?”

  “It might be best not to touch it,” said Phyllis. “I feel very sorry for it, but it may have something catching, especially if it’s come from that research place. We’ll shut it in the shed and telephone the police at Broughton. They’ll know what to do.”

  Vera went back into the house and returned wearing the heavy leather gloves which she used for dispensing petrol and oil to customers. The dog struggled feebly as she put two fingers under the green collar—there was plenty of room—and led it into the shed. As an afterthought, she threw in the ham bone it had been gnawing and some old slices of cold meat, shaken out of their wrapping of greaseproof paper (which Rowf had overlooked). She was a kind-hearted girl.

  When she came in and began washing her hands, Phyllis was already on the telephone.

  Rowf, shivering partly from shock and partly from the bitter morning air, raced up the western slope of Caw. He ran with no attempt at concealment and from time to time gave tongue, scattering the Hall Dunnerdale yows from beneath crags and out of the shelter of heathery clefts. Sheep-dip he could smell, and withered bilberries. He paused an instant over faint traces of gunpowder in an old, sodden cartridge—it was, in fact, the very one with which old Routledge had shot the magpie. Then, hunting on, he lit upon some carrion under a rock, a live hedgehog, a sodden cigarette-butt, the place where a blackcock had roosted for the night, the track of a hare leading northward—everything but what he was seeking. Tired out after the long night, he limped across Brock Barrow, bloody nostrils to the ground, and forced himself to run once more as he came up on the long shoulder of Brown Haw. He stopped to drink and then, as he raised his muzzle once again to the cloudy, grey sky, suddenly caught, strong and clear, the reek he had been looking for. In the same moment a soft, mocking voice spoke from the bracken.

  “What fettle th’ day, kidder? The way ye wor runnin’ Ah thowt yer arse wez afire.”

  Rowf spun round, but could see nothing. He waited, fuming with impatience, and after some little time caught a glimpse of the tod’s mask peering from a tangle of grass ten feet away.

  “Lost yer bit marrer? Noo there’s a bonny goin’ on.”

  “Tod, come with me quickly, now, or I’ll bite your head off. Snitter’s in bad trouble. If you can’t get him out, no one can.”

  There was silence inside the cylinder as Mr. Powell chalked up the monkey’s score—24 plus. He paused a moment and then tapped the metal with his pen, but there was no response from the occupant. He turned to other matters.

  Mr. Powell had come in early to examine and record the hairspray rabbits; a routine job which he should really have completed on the previous evening. The rabbits were assisting in the tests statutorily required before Messrs. Glubstall and Brinkley could market their newly developed “Rinky Dinky” hairspray. The matter had become urgent, since the first tests had yielded somewhat ambiguous results. Messrs. Glubstall and Brinkley were impatiently awaiting clearance, both to manufacture in bulk and also to launch the initial advertising campaign. (“He’ll look at you with new eyes when you’re using—Rinky Dinky!”)

  During instillation the rabbits had been restrained in canvas sleeves, in which they had remained for about fifteen minutes before being transferred to individual steel lockers with adjustable apertures in the doors. Each rabbit sat in a separate locker, with its ears and head protruding through the hole in the door, the edges of which were then closed round its neck so that it could neither withdraw its head nor touch its eyes with its paws. Mr. Powell’s task was to assess damage to the eyes of each rabbit by measuring corneal thickness.

  Having put on his white coat and washed his hands with disinfectant soap, Mr. Powell, thoughtfully tapping his front teeth with his pencil as he read, consulted the log which Miss Avril Watson, his colleague who had carried out instillation, had considerately left open on the laboratory desk.

  “ ‘Instillation carried out between 12:00 and 12:33 hours,’ yesterday—h’m, h’m—so that makes—er—a little over twenty hours now—that’s O.K. ‘No unusual features’—good—‘All rabbits struggled violently upon instillation’—well, wouldn’t you, Avril, dear, eh? ‘Three screamed’—now that’s really useless information; what more does that tell us? ‘Swelling occurred rapidly. Individual checks at 1800 hours showed tissue in a swollen state in each case. Average corneal swelling of 164.14 per cent of normal size’—there’s one good hard fact, anyway—‘lachrymation’—well, obviously—‘fairly severe erythema and oedema formation’—yes, well, let’s cut the cackle and have a shufti for ourselves.”

  The disembodied heads of the rabbits, fixed side by side in a long row, gazed from their lockers at the green-painted, opposite wall. So unnatural, against the dully gleaming background of the metal doors, appeared this straight line of uniform heads without bodies, that the still-sleepy Mr. Powell, yawning and absently exercising the privilege of rubbing his eyes, entertained for a moment the illusion that they were not in fact the heads of living creatures but rather a frieze from some elaborate decoration—as it were, the heads of angels or of the resurrected elect, ranged behind Father, Son and Virgin in some carved tympanum of a west front or reredos of a high altar. (For Mr. Powell, who had grown up in merry Lincoln, had been in his time a choirboy and was by no means unfamiliar with such sights.) However, the elect are not usually depicted with mucous eyes (indeed, we have it on good authority that God will wipe away all tears from their eyes) or with twitching noses, so that after some moments the illusion vanished as Mr. Powell approached Rabbit No. 10,452 (Animal Research used, on average, about 120 rabbits a month).

  “Oh bun, oh bun,” murmured Mr. Powell under his breath, as he took hold of the ears with one hand
and opened the locker with the other, “thy task is done, thou soon wilt be—”

  There was a tap on the laboratory door.

  “Come in,” called Mr. Powell without turning round, “Thou soon wilt be a—a skellytun. A skellytun in the cupboard, bun. Well, that’ll be your next job, I dare say. Some secondary modern bio. class. Mustn’t waste you. Corneal swelling 170.2 per cent of normal. Let’s get that written down.”

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Mr. Powell had supposed that the person outside must be Tyson’s boy, Tom. He now looked up and saw, with something of a shock, a policeman standing at his elbow. He released the rabbit’s ears and instinctively rose to his feet.

  “Sorry if Ah startled you, sir.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, officer. I wasn’t expecting to see you, that’s all. Anything wrong? By the way, d’you mind my asking how you got in? Only I thought the place was still locked up. I’m early, you see.”

  “Oapened a window-catch, Ah’m afraid, sir. Ah rang bell at door, but there was no reply, like. We soomtimes have to gain entry to premises at our discretion, y’ know, if it seems joostified int’ circumstances—say we think there’s soomthing in jee-oppardy. Only anything’s in jee-oppardy, y’see, it becooms necessary to take oonwoanted steps—”

  “Yes, of course. Well, what’s up exactly?”

  At this moment the rabbit blundered into a wooden rack of test tubes. Mr, Powell lifted it back into its locker and adjusted the steel aperture round its neck. The policeman waited patiently until he had finished.

  “Well, Ah’ve joost coom oop from Coniston, sir, y’see. It seems there’s a lady in Doonnerd’l, a Miss Dawson at Seathwaite, who says she’s got one of your dogs shut oop in her shed.”

  “One of our dogs, officer?”

  “That’s what it leuks like, sir. It seems Miss Dawson woke oop this morning and found this ’ere dog havin’ a go at the roobbish-bin, so she roons down, grabs it, like, and pushes it int’ shed.”

  “Did she now?”

  “Ay, she did that. Seems she saw it had green collar, like, and a big coot across it heed. So Miss Dawson, she reckoned it moosta coom from here, and she rings us oop. Well, sergeant rings here hafe an hour ago, but couldn’t get any reply—”

  “Well, he wouldn’t, of course, not so early—”

  “Ay, that’s it, sir. So he says to me to coom oop here and try to find soomone to talk to about it.”

  “Well, I suppose I’m someone. I’ll tell the Director as soon as he comes in.” (And won’t he be delighted? thought Mr. Powell. This is really going to take some getting out of.)

  “Ay, well, it’s like this, y’see, sir. Ah’m to assk whether soomone will kindly accoompany me to Doonnerd’l and see the lady—well, see the dog too, y’ know—identify it an’ that.”

  “What, now this minute?”

  “As seun as possible, sir, if you please. Y’see, if it is in fact saame dog that’s been killing sheep and’s been soomhow mixed oop with yon nassty fatal accident at Cockley Beck, it ought to be identified as seun as possible and removed from the lady’s premises. Naturally, she feels soom anxiety, y’see—”

  In jee-oppardy, thought Mr. Powell. Oh hell, I don’t see how I can refuse. My eye, why’s it always have to be me?

  “All right, officer, I’ll come along at once, if you don’t mind just hanging on while I scribble a note to let my boss know what’s happened, when he comes in.”

  “Ah’m greatly obliged, sir.”

  A few minutes later Mr. Powell and the policeman were speeding on their way to Dunnerdale, while in the clock-ticking solitude of the laboratory the rabbits continued their vigil.

  Snitter lay motionless on the floor of the shed, belly to the ground and eyes half-closed. His muzzle, laid upon his paws, had remained still for so long that his condensing breath had formed a tiny pool of moisture, which glistened in the half-light. His entire being was filled with a sense of quiescence and contentment; and of a riddle answered so unexpectedly and in so astonishing a manner that there could be nothing to do but meditate upon it with a wonder transcending all such petty ideas as hunger, the future or his own safety.

  When the lady with the thick leather gloves had first made towards him, he had cowered away in fear. Yet this fear had been not altogether for himself, but because he had felt it likely that if she touched him she would fall dead; and the thought of this—a repetition of the terrifying explosion as the air about them shattered, driving its sharp fragments into her face; the blood, and her shuddering, silent fall, like that of a dog which he remembered dropping dead from poison in the pen next to his own; the soft, scuffling thud as the body met the ground—the prospect of inflicting such another death was unbearable. When her fingers gripped his collar he had struggled for a few moments but then, true to his nature, had acquiesced at the sound of a kind voice and made no resistance as she opened the shed door and led him into a twilight smelling of apples, dust and wood splinters. He had wondered what she was going to do; but having patted him, spoken a few words and considerately returned his ham bone, she had left him alone.

  After the first shock of surprise it was plain enough to Snitter where he was, for after all he had known the place all his life, every feature of it. Once it had been brighter, tidier, cleaner, brisker-smelling. All the same he was, in fact, nowhere but where he had always been; only now he was actually seeing it for the first time. He was inside his own head. There were his eyes, straight above and in front of him, two square, transparent apertures, side by side, through which the morning light showed fairly clearly. True, they were somewhat grimy—even cobwebbed in places—but that was only to be expected, all unfortunate things considered. He would clean them up later. But he must be situated rather low down in his head, for all he could make out through his eyes was the sky. Directly between them, lower down and straight in front of him, was his muzzle—mouth, nose; both? That was puzzling—a fairly large aperture at ground-level, through which he could perceive smells of rain, mud, oak leaves, a tom-cat somewhere in the offing and still-more-distant sheep. Inside, the place appeared, alas, only what one might expect after all this time—distinctly a mess, untidy and neglected; and about the shelves a beggarly account of empty boxes were thinly scattered to make up a show. But what put the whole thing beyond doubt was the concave cleft running down the middle of the floor, from the place where he himself was lying to his own muzzle in the centre of the further wall. He had always supposed that the cleft must be narrower and deeper in appearance—it certainly felt deeper—but nevertheless he had been right all along about one thing. Pushed into the opening and covering the outlet was a rough ball of chicken-wire, in which were embedded a few old leaves, some chips of wood and scraps of sodden paper. It was clear enough, too, how the cleft had affected him and why he so often felt odd and confused, for on one side of it lay a stack of small logs, with a cleaver and block, while on the other were two rows of clean, resin-smelling splinters tied in bundles—obviously the part which had been split when the cleft was made.

  “So it was the splinters,” said Snitter, getting to his feet and sniffing them over. “Of course, it must have been some of those splinters that made the dark man’s face bleed. But then what made the awful bang? Oh, well, if the lady lets me stay here long enough I suppose I shall come to understand that and a good deal more. My goodness, though, what a mess the place is in! I wish those flies hadn’t got in. Maggots and flies—who wants a lot of flies buzzing round inside his head? Well, now I’m here I’d better make a start on my eyes. How funny it’ll be to clean them from inside! I hope it doesn’t hurt.”

  He jumped up on a shelf running along the further wall, just below the level of his two cobwebbed eyes. There followed a twinge of pain in his head as some light, unseen object fell from beneath his paws and shattered on the ground below. He wondered what part of him it might have been. Still, he could feel nothing immediately wrong. He waited a few moments to recover himself, then put his
fore-paws on the narrow, dirty sill and looked out through his right eye.

  It was just as he had expected. He was looking at the expanse of grass and heather outside the wall down which he and Rowf had sniffed their way before he had jumped over the gate. He could see Rowf’s paw marks in a patch of mud immediately below. He raised one of his own paws and, a little surprised to find the inner surface of his eye so insensitive, pulled down a clot of sticky, dusty cobweb. The dust made him sneeze and he scuffled on the shelf, trying to get the mess off his paw and snapping at a fly that flew against the pane, recovered itself and buzzed away.

  “The trouble is, I don’t think I can reach as far as the top part of this eye,” said Snitter. “I wonder why not? I suppose the whitecoats must have taken some of the inside of my head out—it really does seem awfully empty—and that’s why I can’t climb all the way to the top. Of course when my master—when my master was al—”

  He broke off sharply, stared out and then edged along the shelf to get a clearer view. He had caught sight—he was almost sure he had caught sight—of Rowf and the tod creeping through the long grass a little way to his left. Yes, there they were, beyond all doubt, Rowf conspicuous enough, the tod all but invisible except in the moments when he inched forward.

  But why can’t I hear them? thought Snitter. Goodness knows where my ears are—somewhere out to the sides, I suppose. What do they look like, anyway? Oh, well, never mind; I suppose I can smell the tod. You generally can.

  He jumped down and made his way across to his wiry, cold nose. Yes, sure enough, it was clear that not only Rowf but the unmistakable tod were close outside. A moment later Rowf’s muzzle appeared, half-blocking the light.

  “Snitter! Are you sure you can’t get out? Have you really tried?”

  The question caught Snitter unawares. Was he shut in? No—obviously you couldn’t be shut into your own head against your will. But if he wasn’t, why was it apparently impossible to use his eyes and muzzle at the same time?